By Robert Montgomery, ESPN

Really? Obama is siding with enviro-nazis against fisherman

The Obama administration will accept no more public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing the nation’s oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters.

This announcement comes at the time when the situation supposedly still is “fluid” and the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force still hasn’t issued its final report on zoning uses of these waters.
That’s a disappointment, but not really a surprise for fishing industry insiders who have negotiated for months with officials at the Council on Environmental Quality and bureaucrats on the task force. These angling advocates have come to suspect that public input into the process was a charade from the beginning.

“When the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) completed their successful campaign to convince the Ontario government to end one of the best scientifically managed big game hunts in North America (spring bear), the results of their agenda had severe economic impacts on small family businesses and the tourism economy of communities across northern and central Ontario,” said Phil Morlock, director of environmental affairs for Shimano.

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By Stephen Dinan, Washington Times

 Immigration Activists want payback from Obama

Immigrant rights groups on Monday demanded that President Obama impose a full moratorium on deportations of illegal immigrants, arguing that his policies have been worse for their cause than those of his Republican predecessor.

Saying they’ve been "betrayed" by and lost patience with Mr. Obama, the advocates suggested that the president could regain their support by leading a fight on Capitol Hill for a bill to legalize illegal immigrants. Mr. Obama took the first step toward legalization during a meeting Monday at the White House with two lawmakers working on a bill.

But a bill could take months to pass. In the meantime, the immigrant rights groups say, Mr. Obama must end deportations altogether.

"We demand an immediate stop to all deportations, because each one of these deportations, each one of these numbers, equals a life destroyed and a family devastated," Angelica Sala, executive director of the Coalition for Human Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, said at a news conference in Washington.

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By Philip Klein, American Spectator

The Congressional Budget Office has released its assessment of President Obama’s budget, and the results aren’t pretty. According the analysis, deficits in the next decade will be worse than what the White House has projected, much higher than they would be if we were to follow current law, and even higher than what CBO had forecast last year.

Between 2011 and 2020, the nation will accumulate $9.8 trillion in deficits as a under the Obama budget, according to the CBO, ending the decade with $20.3 trillion in public debt, which translates into a staggering 90 percent of gross domestic product (compared with the 53 percent Obama "inherited" in 2009). By contrast, in its own budget release, the White House Office of Management and Budget had projected debt at 18.6 trillion in 2020 (or about $1.7 trillion less than the CBO).

Obama’s budget would also add more to the debt when it is viewed relative to the CBO baseline scenario that assumes current law is followed, as demonstrated by the area chart below. The blue area represents the additional debt created by Obama’s budget — while it may not look huge, the difference reaches about $5 trillion relative to the CBO baseline scenario (or added debt of 23 percent of GDP) by 2020.

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By Thomas Sowell, National Review

 Obama’s economic sedative

Abraham Lincoln once asked an audience how many legs a dog has, if you called the tail a leg? When the audience said “five,” Lincoln corrected them, saying that the answer was four. “The fact that you call a tail a leg does not make it a leg.”

That same principle applies today. The fact that politicians call something a “stimulus” does not make it a stimulus. The fact that they call something a “jobs bill” does not mean there will be more jobs.

What have been the actual consequences of all the hundreds of billions of dollars that the government has spent? The idea behind the spending is that it will cause investors to invest, lenders to lend, and employers to employ.

That was called “pump priming.” To get a pump going, people put a little water into it, so that the pump will start pumping out a lot of water. In other words, government money alone was never supposed to restore the economy by itself. It was supposed to get the private sector spending, lending, investing, and employing.

The question is: Is that what has actually happened?

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By BOB HERBERT, NYT

 It’s all about Jobs

The Obama administration and Democrats in general are in trouble because they are not urgently and effectively addressing the issue that most Americans want them to: the frightening economic insecurity that has put a chokehold on millions of American families.

The economy shed 36,000 jobs last month, and that was trumpeted in the press as good news. Well, after your house has burned down I suppose it’s good news that the flames may finally be flickering out. But once you realize that it will take 11 million or more new jobs to get us back to where we were when the recession began, you begin to understand that we’re not really making any headway at all.

It’s also widely known by now that the official employment statistics drastically understate the problem. Once we take off the statistical rose-colored glasses, we’re left with the awful reality of millions upon millions of Americans who have lost — or are losing — their jobs, their homes, their small businesses, and their hopes for a brighter future.

Instead of focusing with unwavering intensity on this increasingly tragic situation, making it their top domestic priority, President Obama and the Democrats on Capitol Hill have spent astonishing amounts of time and energy, and most of their political capital, on an obsessive quest to pass a health care bill.

Health care reform is important. But what the public has wanted and still badly needs above all else from Mr. Obama and the Democrats are bold efforts to put people back to work. A major employment rebound is the only real way to alleviate the deep economic anxiety that has gripped so many Americans. Unaddressed, that anxiety inevitably evolves into dread and then anger.

But while the nation is desperate for jobs, jobs, jobs, the Democrats have spent most of the Obama era chanting health care, health care, health care.

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By Robert T. Smith, American Thinker

 Obama shows up late to the spending party

Somewhere deep down inside, The One We Have Been Waiting For must be disappointed to have arrived at the spending party so late. It’s just about over; the ice has melted, the keg of taxpayer-supplied funding is floating, and the public coffers are tapped out.

Each year since 1969, Congress has spent more money than its "income." The Treasury Department has to borrow money to meet Congress’s appropriations. The national debt currently increases by $3.89 billion per day and stands at over $12.4 trillion. Each American citizen’s share of the debt is over $40,000, and this debt is growing.   

It seems almost impossible for The One to believe that America’s revulsion over more spending isn’t about him. How could we not recognize how sophisticated, intelligent, or just plain cool he is and end the spending party at the very moment he and his enabler friends arrived with so many ideas for more spending party activities?   

By their statements in the media, it appears clear that The One and his enablers believe that America’s rejection of continuing the spending party must be about racism, or anti-government radicalism, or perhaps just astroturf orchestrated by the evil Republican establishment who wants to control the spending party itself. The One and his enablers seem stupefied as to why so many Americans are attempting to thwart all the spending partying they wish to inflict on them; it is incomprehensible to them why Americans want to end the spending party now.

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FOXNews

 Obama plays loose with the facts in healthcare campaign stop

President Obama, making his final push for health care reform, pitched his proposal Monday to a crowd in Pennsylvania with a deficit-reduction figure that the White House later admitted missed the mark.

"Our cost-cutting measures mirror most of the proposals in the current Senate bill, which reduces most people’s premiums and brings down our deficit by up to $1 trillion dollars over the next decade because we’re spending our health care dollars more wisely," Obama told an audience at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pa., a suburb north of Philadelphia.

Obama was so proud of these cost-saving numbers in the latest version of health care reform, he delved into a bit of Washington-speak to back them up.

"Those aren’t my numbers," Obama said to the rising applause of the estimated 1,300 in attendance. "They are the savings determined by the Congressional Budget Office, which is the nonpartisan, independent referee of Congress for what things cost."

But the budget office did not say the Senate health care bill would save $1 trillion over the next decade — or even close to that figure.

It estimated the bill would save $132 billion from 2010 to 2019, leaving Obama’s "next decade" estimate $868 billion short.

When contacted about this disparity, a White House official said Obama meant to say the Senate bill would save $1 trillion in its second decade.

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By Roger Hedgecock, WND

Obama’s energy plan is collapsing 

The president promised to "transform America."

As part of that transformation, Obama proposed to reduce the use of cheap oil, natural gas and coal by raising the price of these energy sources through regulation and taxation until consumers used less. Simultaneously, the federal government would subsidize wind, solar and geothermal to create "green" jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

The primary push behind these policies was Obama’s belief in the radical environmentalists’ notion that use of traditional fuels was changing the climate. During the 2008 campaign, Obama admitted that electricity rates for every consumer would "necessarily skyrocket" under his plan.

(Earth to Obama: Methane gas is 30 times more a greenhouse gas than CO2. More methane is naturally leaking from the Arctic Ocean floor today than CO2 from human sources.)

The political wheels are coming off this goofy energy plan.

Last week, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., submitted legislation that would stop the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions for two years. This would stop the EPA from imposing a "cap-and-trade" tax on energy while legislation authorizing "cap and trade" is stalled in Congress because of overwhelming public opposition.

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AP

 Obama is on a mission to pass healthcare no matter what

In private pitches to Democrats, President Barack Obama says he will persuade Congress to pass his health care overhaul even if it kills him and even if he has to ask deeply distrustful lawmakers to trust him on a promise the White House doesn’t have the power to keep.

That, in a sometimes darkly joking way, is what the president is telling Democratic House members as he begins an all-out push to coax Congress into passing his proposals despite voters’ misgivings and Republicans’ dire warnings.

"He made the case, ‘Listen, we put in a very hard year working on health care reform and the time for action is now,’" said Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wis., one of several Democrats who met with Obama at the White House on Thursday.

Obama joked that the political battle has contributed to the recent rise in his cholesterol, Kind said, and the president noted how ironic it would be if health care drove him to his grave.

But Obama is anything but sickly these days, making health care pitches Monday in Philadelphia and Wednesday in St. Louis, and instructing aides to address every question or concern Democratic lawmakers possibly can raise.

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